Social Life of Climate Change
Seminar Series
These research seminars are interdisciplinary discussions around contemporary debates in the humanistic social sciences of climate change and the environment.
Events take multiple formats, including standard seminar format as well as more engaged discussions of relevant readings and works in progress.
The seminars are open to all. If you would like access to any of the upcoming seminars please email geog.research@lse.ac.uk.
If you'd like to join our mailing list, please sign up here.
The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and Environment, the Department of Sociology and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
It is organised by Kasia Paprocki (k.paprocki@lse.ac.uk) and Austin Zeiderman (a.zeiderman@lse.ac.uk) of the Department of Geography and Environment and Rebecca Elliott (r.elliott1@lse.ac.uk) of the Department of Sociology.
Please contact Kasia Paprocki with any questions. Updates can be found on X and on the SLCC website.
Spring Term 2026
Feminist Perspectives of Climate Change: Social Reproduction and Survival in the Great Caribbean
May 18, 3-4.30pm, Online via Zoom
Prof Diana Ojeda, Departments of Geography and International Studies and Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University, Bloomington
Catastrophic narratives of the end of the world populate climate change knowledge and policy. Seeking to disrupt these narratives’ enticement of fear and violence, this lecture focuses on the places where the world has ended many times. In the face of US military interventions and ongoing environmental crises, I draw from feminist studies to explore the overlapping geographies of dispossession and accumulation, extraction and exploitation, and tourism and militarization that have historically shaped the Great Caribbean, situating it in the frontlines of climate change. From a perspective informed by social reproduction, I further delve into the lived experiences of climate change in the region and the everyday forms of resistance to it.
The politics of land and infrastructure in the making of Indonesia’s “Geothermal Island”
27 May, 4-5.30pm, OLD 3.24
Prof Emily Yeh, Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder
With 40% of the world’s known geothermal reserves and second in installed capacity, Indonesia plans to become a “geothermal superpower.” Geothermal is particularly important as a baseload power source as the country struggles to meet its decarbonization goals. In this context, Flores island was designated a “Geothermal Island” in 2017, but development of geothermal has been very slow due to resistance from indigenous communities. This resistance has been largely dismissed and misunderstood by policymakers, development personnel, and government staff, who paint Flores residents as uneducated or manipulated by outside interests. In this presentation I will discuss four case studies in Flores where geothermal development is either planned or implemented. In doing so I will highlight the politics of indigenous ontologies of land, infrastructure, and articulations of indigeneity in their struggles.
Towards a buoyant political ecology: Rethinking marginalization for coastal climate change adaptation in the tropics
9 June, 5-6.30pm, OLD 3.24
Prof Haripriya Rangan, Australia India Institute and School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne and Prof Judith Carney, Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles
The land-water dichotomy plays a key role in the prevailing global climate change adaptation (CCA) policy discourse for tropical coastal areas. This dichotomy is implicitly informed by a land-centred conception of property which regards areas that fluctuate between water and land, or 'aquaterras', as marginal and in need of development to make them economically profitable. By adopting this perspective, mainstream CCA policies ignore the diverse, vernacular systems of adaptation that communities that dwell in such tropical coastal aquaterras have developed through multigenerational and lived experiences to negotiate climatic and contingent uncertainties. We call on political ecologists to jettison land-centred, economic representations of marginality and marginalisation in favour of a 'buoyant', critical CCA approach which recognizes and builds on the vernacular expertise of tropical coastal aquaterra communities.
Winter Term 2026
Research is a Land Relation
3 February, 5-6.30pm, OLD 3.24
Prof Max Liboiron, Professor in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland
All research has a relationship to land. It can uphold colonialism, or it can resist it. Even well-intentioned projects in environmental science and activism often assume automatic rights to study or manage Indigenous land. That assumption comes from an inherited colonial worldview. Given this inheritance, the question then becomes: how do we enact better land relations through science, through research?
In this talk, Dr. Max Liboiron will draw from their book Pollution is Colonialism while sharing new lessons and insights developed since its 2021 publication. These include the evolution of “community peer review” into fuller practices of community co-analysis, along with other emerging methods that reshape how research is designed, analyzed, and even written (footnotes and puns will make an appearance). Anticolonial science is not only possible - it is already happening.
Climate Methodologies: A Dialogue on the Social Life of Environmental Knowledge
9 February, 4-5.30pm, OLD 3.24
Prof Harriet Bulkeley, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University
Climate change is radically reconfiguring not only the world we live in, but also the methods we use to understand it. How do we adapt our methodological toolkit in the environmental social sciences and humanities in response to the climate urgencies and emergencies that surround us? How are the human and environmental sciences at large shifting their modes of enquiry? What new forms of climate knowledge are emerging and with what effects?
In this dialogue, we take up these questions in dialogue with Prof Harriet Bulkeley, a leading thinker in the politics of climate change, who will discuss her own responses to the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by the changing climate along with SLCC organisers. This forms part of an ongoing series of conversations about how climate change unsettles established modes of inquiry and demands new ways of rethinking our disciplinary approaches to knowing the social world and its relationship with the environment. The discussion will be of interest to those researching the social life of climate change as well as those concerned with the contested politics of climate knowledge.
Atlantic Transitions: Freedom and Justice from Abolition to Climate Change
3 March, 5-6.30pm, OLD 3.24
Dr Jake Subryan Richards, Assistant Professor, Department of International History, LSE with Prof Austin Zeiderman, Professor in Geography, Department of Geography and Environment, LSE
This event brings together Jake Subryan Richards and Austin Zeiderman in a conversation exploring freedom and justice across Atlantic worlds from abolition to the climate crisis. Drawing on two recently published books, Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River (Duke, 2025) and The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale, 2025), the discussion examines the transition from enslavement to liberation as an uneven, contested, and unfinished process that remains entangled with the political and economic order responsible for contemporary planetary predicaments. Grounded in historical and ethnographic perspectives, the event asks how abolition can illuminate contemporary debates about energy, climate, and just transitions.
The Market that Cannot Know Itself: Missing the Forest for the Trees in Carbon Crediting Schemes
24 March, 5-6.30pm, OLD 3.24
Dr Javier Lezaun, Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford
Independent studies show that a majority of projects dedicated to the production of carbon credits in Mexico are victims of criminal extortion, or suffer materially from pervasive insecurity. Yet this predicament is rarely mentioned in the regular reports that monitor the progress of these projects, and the issue of violence is studiously avoided in public discussions about carbon markets in Mexico. This is striking, given the penchant of these markets for “transparency” and “auditability,” and their commitment to provide “social safeguards” to the communities that participate in the production of credits. Drawing on Claudio Lomnitz’s thesis of the contemporary Mexican state as “estranged” from itself, this paper explores the mechanisms that allow a market so invested in making territories and communities legible to “take its distance” from the conditions of chronic insecurity that shape its functioning.